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Updated: June 8, 2025
The Todas of S. India abstain from the flesh of their domestic animal, the buffalo; but once a year they sacrifice a bull calf, which is eaten in the forest by the adult males. Cattle. Cattle are respected by many pastoral peoples; they live on milk or game, and the killing of an ox is a sacrificial function. Conspicuous among Egyptian animal cults was that of the bull, Apis.
Ashêrah was the goddess of fertility, and though the fertility of the earth depends upon the Sun, it was easy to conceive of it as an independent principle. The name Baal was merely a title. It was applied to the supreme deity of each city or tribe, by whatever special name he might otherwise be known. There were as many Baals or Baalim as there were states or cults.
Now it should be remembered that for the man of Old Japan, as for the Greek or the Roman citizen of early times, religion consisted chiefly in the exact observance of multitudinous custom; and that it was therefore difficult to know whether, in performing the duties of the several cults, one had not inadvertently displeased the Unseen.
We see the beginning of the evolution of the male god in the phallic cults. This was eventually followed by the patriarchal system and here we are on more familiar ground. Patriarchy succeeded matriarchy, but whether as a gradual evolution or otherwise is not clear. Some writers speak of bitter conflicts in Persia, India, Greece and elsewhere.
Both reptile and bovine incarnations manifest themselves in the story of the Exodus, and despite the fervent missionary efforts of a series of Prophets, and the adhesion of many, even among the northern tribesmen, to the more spiritual creed, these cults gathered force in the congenial neighbourhood of Aramaeans and Phoenicians, till they led to political separation of the north from the south as soon as the long reign of Solomon was ended.
Another thing to be said is that America has a unique history among great nations in that it has never been affected by any great religious influence except that which has issued from the Scriptures. No religion has ever been influential in America except Christianity. For many years there have been sporadic and spasmodic efforts to extend the influence of Buddhism or other Indian cults.
But the habits of thought which these practices foster and conserve make up but one half of the substance of the anthropomorphic cults. The other, complementary element of devout life the animistic habit of mind is recruited and conserved by a second range of practices organized under clerical sanction.
New cults, new religions, new organizations of all sorts, insisting upon their novelty and difference, are most prolific and most successful wherever there is an abundant supply of dissociated people, where movement is in excess of deliberation, and creeds and formulae unyielding and unadaptable because they are unthinking.
The Hebrews had no plastic art of their own, seem to have had small disposition in their earlier history to make images, and later such forms were excluded by the antagonism of the prophets to foreign cults and by refined ideas of the deity. The absence of images in the Zoroastrian cult may be accounted for in a similar way from early lack of artistic impulse and later elevated conceptions.
+981+. The history of the movement which has elevated monotheism to the highest place among the civilized cults extends over the whole period of man's life on the earth.
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